New York, December 3, 2007 -- Randy Pausch, Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon
University, has won the
2007 Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award from the Association for
Computing Machinery (ACM) for creating innovative ways to teach computer
science by making it more accessible and fun.
Professor Pausch’s team developed the programming tool known as Alice, a revolutionary
software project that uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to help
beginning programmers, particularly women, overcome initial frustrations. He is a co-founder of Carnegie Mellon’s
Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) which encourages technologists and fine
artists to collaborate on projects that entertain, inform, and inspire. The Karlstrom Award carries a $5,000 prize,
which is supplied by the Prentice-Hall Publishing Company.

Professor Pausch was cited for his "outstanding creative
contributions to the art of teaching and mentoring and for the innovative Alice programming
environment with which novices can create interactive 3D experiences."

In the early 1990s, Professor Pausch began work at the University of Virginia
on what was to become Alice,
a freely available teaching tool. Alice
began as an easy-to-use scripting tool for building virtual worlds. This Java-based interactive program enables
users to create 3-D computer animations without the need for high-level
programming skills. Designed solely to teach programming, Alice
is intended to appeal to those not normally exposed to computer programming,
such as middle school girls, by encouraging storytelling through a simple
drag-and-drop interface. Its application
makes it easy to
create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a
video to share on the web

Professor Pausch arrived at Carnegie
Mellon, his alma mater, in 1997, and instituted a broadly cross-disciplinary
course titled "Building Virtual Worlds." This popular course, which
put artists and technologists together, was critical to creating the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) in
1998, as a joint program between the School
of Computer Science and the College of Fine Arts.

Together with Don Marinelli,
Professor of Drama and Arts Management at Carnegie Mellon, Professor Pausch constructed
a curriculum for ETC’s two-year Masters program that forms interdisciplinary
student teams to develop projects using interactive and other creative media. Professor Pausch once termed the ETC a "dream
fulfillment factory" as so many students went on from the ETC to their dream
jobs. The program offers opportunities
for artists and engineers, working together, to apply advances in digital technology
for creating new forms of entertainment, training, and education.

Professor Pausch’s focus on
virtual reality included his stint at Walt Disney Imagineering in 1995. On a sabbatical from the University of Virginia,
where he had been teaching computer science, he applied human-computer
interface expertise to help design virtual reality rides like "Aladdin’s Magic
Carpet" and "Virtual Pirates of the Caribbean"
for DisneyQuest. He went on to do a
sabbatical at the video game company Electronic Arts (EA) in 2004. In 2006, EA agreed to help underwrite the
development of Alice 3.0, the latest version of Pausch’s revolutionary tool,
and to provide essential arts assets from "The Sims™" -- the all-time
best selling PC video game. Professor
Pausch has also consulted with Google
Inc. on user interface design.

An active leader over many years
in the ACM Special Interest Groups on Graphics (SIGGRAPH) and Computer Human
Interaction (SIGCHI), Professor Pausch has served on the editorial boards and
as a reviewer for several ACM peer-reviewed publications, including ACM Interactions, ACM Transactions on
Computer-Human Interaction, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, ACM
Transactions on Graphics, and ACM
Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. He is the author or co-author of five
books and more than 70 articles on computer graphics, human-computer
interaction, and virtual reality.

A
Magna Cum Laude graduate of Brown
University with
departmental honors in 1982, Professor Pausch received a Ph.D. in computer
science from Carnegie Mellon in 1988. He
was named a recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the
National Science Foundation in 1991. He
was a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow in 1994-95.

Professor Pausch has been named a 2007 ACM Fellow. He is also the winner of the 2007 ACM Special
Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education. This award is to be presented at the ACM
SIGCSE Conference in March 2008, where Professor Pausch is scheduled to deliver
a keynote address.

About ACM

ACM, the Association for
Computing Machinery http://www.acm.org, is an
educational and scientific society uniting the world’s computing educators,
researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address
the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the profession’s collective voice
through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition
of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long
learning, career development, and professional networking.